Monthly Archives: July 2020

From scandal to Opening Night carnage

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2020-07-25 AstroTheGrouch

The only trolling of either the Asterisks or the Rogue Sox on their Opening Nights was this cutout fellow . . . in the Oakland Coliseum.

Regular-season day one of the Houston Astros’ post-Astrogate era came in with a bang. Not the kind that indicates transmitting signs stolen off an illegally-installed camera by way of a clubhouse monitor, but the kind that means a five-run inning and an 8-2 win over the Seattle Mariners.

Their fellow sign-stealing criminals, the Boston Red Sox, saw and raised on day one of their post-Red Sox Replay Room Reconnaissance Ring era. Even if, considering their opposition, you could accuse them this time of doing it the easy way, blowing the Baltimore Orioles out 13-2.

The best news for the Asterisks other than their Opening Day win? Not a single batter faced a knockdown pitch. The best news for the Rogue Sox likewise? Not a single batter got plunked, either—but Red Sox relief pitcher Phillips Valdez did hit two Orioles, one each in the eighth and the ninth. Quite unintentionally.

Neither the Astros nor the Red Sox looked good when they were exposed and affirmed as high-tech cheaters during the seasons of their recent World Series championships and barely brought themselves to own it, man up, and apologise properly this past winter. Leaving many, even their own die-hards, wondering whether retribution would be swift and sure.

The coronavirus world tour that suspended the Show until delayed “summer camp” training opened up may or may not have knocked those thoughts out, even if three Astros got hit very unintentionally during an exhibition game against the Kansas City Royals last week. Baseball in the age of pandemic isn’t very likely to put cheaters’ retribution high on its priority list.

Don’t even think about it, conspiracy theorists. Whatever the origin of the virus that launched out of China, it wasn’t anybody’s idea of giving either the Asterisks or the Rogue Sox cover for their crimes, either. Public humiliation sometimes beats a pestiferous pestilence for humbling the formerly haughty.

Just ask Orioles manager Brandon Hyde. His pitching staff was so futile Friday night that social media wags suggested the Orioles needed (and were about) to sign Dr. Anthony Fauci. The epidemiologist whose stiff-armed ceremonial first pitch, before the Washington Nationals’ season opener against the New York Yankees, sailed far enough past the home plate circle that the same wags also said controversial home plate umpire Angel Hernandez called it a strike on the corner.

“For me,” Hyde said balefully after the carnage ended at last, “I’d like to flush this one.” He’ll need the Ty-D-Bol Man to clean the commode after that one.

In a way, the Astros could have been accused of winning the easy way too on Friday night. They met the Mariners nineteen times in 2019 and won eighteen. For the Astros, no matter what they’re coming away from, competition like that is the next best thing to summer camp.

Justin Verlander, their future Hall of Famer starting pitcher, worked six innings, struck out seven, walked only one, and surrendered both Seattle runs by way of the solo long ball, from Kyle Lewis in the second and Korey Seager in the fourth. Just another night at the office.

But he was in a sober mood after the game, and not because of the two long balls he surrendered after surrendering 36 last season. (He averages 23 homers surrendered per 162 game lifetime, by the way. Turn off the alarm bells, there are Hall of Famers who surrendered a little more. Robin Roberts lifetime surrendered two fewer [503] than Eddie Murray hit. [505.])

“Obviously guys are risking a lot here,” Verlander said post-game, “myself included with a young daughter at home, to bring America’s pastime back to people and hopefully cheer them up and give them a little bit of a reprieve from a lot of the stuff that’s been happening.”

Peculiarly, considering the net result, Michael Brantley was the only Astro to collect more than one hit on a night that only George Springer and Yuli Gurriel went hitless for them. And they were down 2-0 when the fifth inning arrived and the fun began for them.

Aledmys Diaz opened with a base hit to somewhat deep center field, then took third as Martin Maldonado’s shot to third was thrown off line enabling Maldonado himself to have first on the house, before taking second on Springer’s ground out back to Seattle starting pitcher Marco Gonzales.

Jose Altuve dumped a single to left to send Diaz home and chase Gonzales in favour of Zac Grotz. The new and dubious three-batter minimum rule bit Grotz and the Mariners right in the kishkes right off the bat, when Alex Bregman singled Maldonado home and Brantley drove one into the right field seats, before Grotz got Gurriel to ground out to third and Carlos Correa to pop out to second.

The Astros tacked single runs on in the sixth and the seventh and let the bullpen finish what Verlander started. No muss, no fuss, and no known shenanigans. And it was nothing compared to what the Red Sox detonated against the Orioles. Their 10-0 lead after five innings was enough to tempt the Orioles to petition the Hague lodging human rights violations charges.

The Red Sox scored four in the third and six in the fourth, and their starting pitcher Nathan Eovaldi—who opened the game with a 100-mph fastball to Austin Hays—found himself in the unusual position of having such a comfort zone he could have let each Oriole batter know what was coming and still gotten rid of them fast enough.

Three RBI doubles including a two-runner by Kevin Pillar hung up the third-inning four-spot. Well enough into the Oriole bullpen in the fourth, Andrew Benintendi walked the fifth Red Sox run home to start that inning’s fun and prompt a pitching change. Fat lot of good that did the Orioles. J.D. Martinez promptly scored Jackie Bradley, Jr. and Jose Peraza with a ground-rule double.

Rafael Devers then hit into the first Red Sox out of the inning. That relief lasted long enough for Xander Bogaerts to single Benintendi home, Pillar to single Martinez home, and Christian Vazquez to single Bogaerts home. And Bradley and Peraza had more destruction to offer the Orioles in the sixth, Bradley hitting a two-run double and Peraza hitting a single-run double right after that.

Somewhere, the Orioles snuck two runs home on a sixth-inning double (Renato Nunez) and a seventh-inning homer. (Rio Ruiz.) They may still be trying to figure out how those happened, when they’re not trying to figure out just how the Red Sox mustered the burial without Mookie Betts, who’s now the Los Angeles Dodgers’ $396 million man after the Sox sent him and David Price out west in an unlikely salary dump.

For the Astros’ new manager, Dusty Baker, it was his 3,500th game as a major league manager. “That,” he said about Friday night’s flogging, “was the strangest opener of my career.”

Maybe playing in their home playpens helped, and likewise the lack of live fans in the stands, but the only thing trolling either the Astros or the Red Sox over their high-tech cheating scandals was in the Oakland Coliseum, where the Athletics—whose pitcher Mike Fiers (a 2017 Astro) blew the whistle on Astrogate last November—hosted the Los Angeles Angels to open the season.

One of the fan-financed cutouts in the Coliseum seats showed Oscar the Grouch in an Astros hat in a trash can marked with the Asterisk logo that went viral as Astrogate unfurled last winter. The Astros travel to Oakland for the first time for a series beginning 7 August. Bet on Oscar the Astrogrouch being among the cutouts then. That should be the least of their problems.

It’s deja vu all over again for the Mets

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2020-07-24 YoenisCespedes

Cespedes went into the seats in his return but deGrom added just more evidence for a non-support case Friday.

Pandemic delay or no pandemic delay, the 2020 season finds the New York Mets picking up just about where they left off last year. Not that beating the Atlanta Braves 1-0 on Friday was a terrible thing for them, of course. And not that Yoenis Cespedes, too long among the Mets’ living dead on the injured list, going long his first day back was terrible, either.

But their neglect of theirs and the National League’s best pitcher two seasons running, pending Jack Flaherty’s continuing maturation, continues yet. He’s too much a team player to say it, but surely Jacob deGrom thinks of games like Friday’s and thinks to himself, “It’s been lovely, but I have to scream now.”

Defending back-to-back Cy Young Awards, pitching like a future Hall of Famer, eight strikeouts in five innings, one walk, and one measly hit. (The innings limit was the Mets taking no chances after deGrom’s back tightness last week.) And nothing to show for it other than an ERA opening at zero.

Last year, deGrom had twelve such quality starts, averaging seven innings per, and came out with nothing to show for those. If his team played the way he pitched, he’d have been a 23-game winner and the Mets might have ended up in the postseason. Him definitely; them, might. As a former Mets manager once said, it was deja vu all over again Friday afternoon in Citi Field.

The Braves’ starting pitcher, Mike Soroka, got a grand taste himself of how deGrom must feel at times. He pitched six innings and, while he wasn’t deGrom’s kind of strikeout pitcher Friday afternoon, he did punch out three, scatter four hits, and come away with nothing to show for it but handshakes from the boss and whatever equals a pat on the back in the social-distancing season.

His relief, Chris Martin, wasn’t so fortunate. After ridding himself of Michael Conforto to open the bottom of the seventh on a fly out to deep enough center field, Martin got Cespedes to look at a first-strike slider just above the middle of the plate. Then he threw Cespedes a fastball just off it, and Cespedes drove it parabolically into the empty left field seats.

The piped-in crowd noise at Citi Field drowned out the thunk! when the ball landed in no man, woman, or child’s land. It was the game’s only scoring, but the Mets’ bullpen had a surprise of their own in store once deGrom’s afternoon was done.

They left the matches, blow torches, gasoline cans, and incendiary devices behind. They performed no known impression of an arson squad. They cleaned up any mess they might have made swiftly enough.

Seth Lugo, maybe the Mets’ least incendiary reliever last year, shook off a double to left by newly minted Brave Marcell Ozuna, and his advance to third on a passed ball, to get Matt Adams—signed but let loose by the Mets and scooped up by the Braves—to ground out to third and Austin Riley to look at strike three. Crowning two innings relief in which Lugo also made strikeout work of Alex Jackson and Ronald Acuna, Jr.

Justin Wilson, taking over for the eighth and looking like he was finding the right slots last year, shook off Dansby Swanson’s leadoff single to strike Adam Duvall out looking, before luring pinch hitter Johan Comargo into grounding out to second and striking Acuna out for the side.

Then Edwin Diaz, the high-priced closer who vaporised last year, opened by getting Ozzie Albies to ground out, shook off a walk to Freddie Freeman, and struck Ozuna out looking and Adams out swinging for the game.

Already freshly minted Mets manager Luis Rojas looks like a genius, or at least unlike a lost explorer. And Cespedes—about whom it was reasonable to wonder if he’d ever play major league baseball again—made sure any complaints about this season’s universal DH were silenced for this game at least.

“The funny thing is I joked with him before the game,” deGrom told reporters postgame. “I said ‘why are you hitting for me?’ He went out and hit a home run for us which was big. I was inside doing some shoulder stuff, my normal after pitching routine and yeah I was really happy for him.”

It didn’t work out quite that well for the Braves, with Adams going 0-for-4 with two strikeouts on the afternoon. Neither side mustered an especially pestiferous or throw-weight offense other than Cespedes’s blast.

But you half expected a low-score, low-hit game out of both deGrom and Soroka considering the disrupted spring training, the oddity of “summer camp,” and perhaps just a little lingering unease over just how to keep playing baseball like living, breathing humans while keeping a solid eye and ear on social distancings and safety protocols.

In a sixty-game season it all counts even more acutely than it would have on a normal Opening Day. The Mets and the Braves were each expected to contend this season before the coronavirus world tour yanked MLB’s plans over-under-sideways-down. They’re not taking their eyes off that just yet.

Before the game began, the Mets and the Braves—like the New York Yankees and Washington Nationals in D.C., like the Los Angeles Dodgers and San Francisco Giants by the Bay Thursday night—lined up on the baselines and held a long, long, long black ribbon. This time, with nobody kneeling before “The Star Spangled Banner” was played.

Maybe athletes can remind people that it’s dead wrong for rogue police to do murder against black and all people without running into the buzz saws of explicit national anthem protests and fury over the protests, after all.

The Braves have other alarms, though. Freeman, of course, is recently recovered from COVID-19 but two of their three catchers—Tyler Flowers and former Met Travis d’Arnaud—showed COVID-19 symptoms and went to the injured list. The good news: both catchers tested negative for the virus.

But lefthanded pitcher Cole Hamels hit the IL with triceps tendinitis. Not good. Every live arm counts in a short season, especially for legitimate contenders. Just ask the Mets, who’ll be missing Marcus Stroman with a calf muscle tear, even if Stroman historically heals quickly.

You hope both teams recover swiftly enough. You also hope the Mets find a way to make deGrom’s won-lost record look as good as he pitches and fast. Those non-support filing papers don’t take that long to draw up.

 

Alfred Hitchcock presents Opening Night

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AlfredHitchcockAt long enough last came Opening Day. Well, Opening Night. On which New York Yankees right fielder Aaron Judge nailed the COVID-19 delayed season’s first hit and his teammate Giancarlo Stanton nailed its first home run two batters later.

On which the Washington Nationals opened without a key element, outfielder Juan Soto, whose positive COVID-19 test result came back well enough before game time to make him a scratch.

Before that rain-shortened game even got started, the word came from the opposite coast that Clayton Kershaw was scratched from his Opening Night start thanks to a back problem sending him onto the injured list.

In Washington, the Nats’ co-ace Max Scherzer would have loved if Judge and Stanton were Thursday night scratches. They accounted for all Yankee runs in the 4-1 final shortened in the top of the sixth when the rains smashed in with the Yankees having first and third and one out.

In San Francisco, Los Angeles Dodgers rookie Dustin May pitched five innings to San Francisco Giants veteran Johnny Cueto’s four, both men leaving with a one-all tie, and the Dodgers’ new $396 million man Mookie Betts broke the tie scoring on an infield ground out in the top of the seventh.

Scherzer’s good news Thursday night: eleven strikeouts. His bad news: four walks and an inability to solve Judge and Stanton. Judge also doubled home Tyler Wade in the third and Stanton singled home Gio Urshela in the fifth. Remove Judge and Stanton from the Yankee lineup and the Nats’ Adam Eaton’s hefty solo home run in the bottom of the first would have been the game’s only score.

Betts singled with one out in the top of the seventh and called for the ball. Published reports indicate that ball plus the evening’s official lineup card now repose in his home. “It’s just a new chapter in life,” he told reporters after the 8-1 Dodgers win.

After he came home when Justin Turner grounded into a force out, Corey Seager’s grounder got Cody Bellinger caught in a rundown at the plate, but Enrique Hernandez singled home Turner and Seager (who’d taken second during the rundown), Joc Pederson and A.J. Pollock walked back-to-back to load the pads, Austin Barnes sent Hernandez home with an infield hit, and Max Muncy walked Pederson home.

And, on both coasts, all four teams figured out a solution to the issue of whether or not to take a knee for “The Star Spangled Banner” that might actually help more than hurt the too-easily outraged.

Abetted by a suggestion from Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Andrew McCutchen, the Yankees and the Nats lined up on the base lines holding a long, long, long black ribbon, standing apart enough for social distance, then took their knees before “The Star Spangled Banner” was played.

On the same suggestion, the Dodgers and the Giants held a similar long, black ribbon and took their knees before the anthem’s playing. In Washington, both the Yankees and the Nats rose from their knees while the anthem was played. In San Francisco, ten Giants including manager Gabe Kapler plus Betts on the Dodgers’ side stayed on their knees during the anthem, with Bellinger and Muncy putting hands on Betts’s shoulder as a gesture of support.

I went back on record Thursday saying that there are far worse ways than kneeling before a national anthem to protest something you think is dead wrong. Kneeling, as two Scientific American writers I cited remind us, is anything except disrespect.

“While we can’t know for sure, kneeling probably derives from a core principle in mammalian nonverbal behavior: make the body smaller and look up to show respect, esteem, and deference,” wrote psychologists Jeremy Adam Smith and Dacher Keltner in 2017.  “. . . Kneeling can also be a posture of mourning and sadness. It makes the one who kneels more vulnerable. In some situations, kneeling can be seen as a request for protection.”

I’ll ask again: Would you rather those outraged by rogue police doing murder against black or any people raise clenched fists, burn a flag on the field, or start a riot with or without looting and plundering in the bargain? Neither would I. But if only now-former football quarterback Colin Kaepernick had thought in the first place to take his original knee before the anthem played, would that have worked very differently for himself and the outraged?

Let me repeat, too, that you don’t have to subscribe to every last clause or every last impulse of the social justice warriors to agree that rogue police doing murder is not what the land of the free and the home of the brave was supposed to mean. Neither must you subscribe to the formal Black Lives Matter movement itself to agree that black lives and all lives don’t deserve to end when those entrusted to uphold the law break it instead.

Let me repeat further that it’d be far better for baseball to limit playing “The Star Spangled Banner” to before games on Opening Days, games played on significant national holidays, the All-Star Game, and Games One and (if it goes that far) Seven of the World Series. Not so much to cut back on the kneeling protests but to re-emphasise that patriotism compulsory is patriotism illusory.

Back on the field, Soto’s COVID-19 positive test approaching Opening Night shook the game up just enough to provoke serious questions as to how MLB is going to navigate even this truncated season without further medical issues. And, whether the most stringent health and safety protocols will keep more Sotos from turning up positive.

Other surrealities include the empty stands, other than cardboard cutouts of fans in the seats, and the canned crowd sounds at the ballparks. The coronavirus world tour already turned baseball into something between The Twilight Zone and the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Now that the season is underway at last, should we throw Alfred Hitchcock Presents into the mix?

At least neither Opening Night game went to extra innings, so we didn’t have to deal right off the bat with the free cookie on second base awarded each team to start its extra half-inning. The mischief that’ll inspire will just have to wait.

Funny thing, though, about that equally nefarious three-batter minimum for pitchers. Two Giants relievers faced the minimum in that five-run Dodger seventh before surrendering any runs. If bullpen preservation was part of it even if those two got pried, I can see already that this dumb rule isn’t going to end well for Kapler and other managers.

And, let’s be real, the PA people in charge of the piped-in sounds are only human, after all. Who’s going to be the first poor sap having to live down the accident of cranking up the wild cheering when the home team’s batter gets hit by a pitch?

On the other hand, it was easy enough to feel normal again once the Yankees and the Nats got underway . . . when home plate umpire Angel Hernandez began blowing pitch calls. Calling a few strikes balls and a few balls strikes? That’s about par for the course for him. So when’s that umpire accountability coming at last?

Before the game, Dr. Anthony Fauci—otherwise doing his best to battle a pandemic involving both a stubborn virus and a political (lack of) class that surely makes him wonder if he was really there when all this happened—threw out a ceremonial first pitch. Later, he was seen in the stands with his Nats-themed face mask off his face a spell. What’s up with that, Doc?

You’d love to say Fauci threw a perfect strike to Nats relief pitcher Sean Doolittle behind the plate, but you’d be lying like an office holder. Fauci’s delivery is described politely as resembling a man trying to compensate for a fractured upper arm. The ball sailed almost to the on-deck circle. Rumour has it that Hernandez called it a strike on the outside corner.

Oh, say, can’t you see?

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Giants Anthem Baseball

“I see nothing more patriotic than peaceful protests when things are frustrating and upsetting,” says San Francisco Giants manager Gabe Kapler about some of his players and coaches kneeling before a Tuesday exhibition game while facing the flag for the national anthem.

When I was a boy growing up in a Reform Jewish family, the prayers spoken in temple on Shabbat included one that translated thus: “Unto Thee alone every knee must bend and every tongue give homage.” In that context, to kneel is to humble oneself before a greater power, as indeed do church congregations around the world.

Two Scientific American writers, Jeremy Adam Smith and Dacher Keltner (whose surname is also that of the infielder who helped stop Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak), once observed that first-glance research indicated “nothing threatening about kneeling.”

Instead, kneeling is almost always deployed as a sign of deference and respect. We once kneeled before kings and queens and altars; we kneel to ask someone to marry, or at least men did in the old days. We kneel to get down to a child’s level; we kneel to beg.

While we can’t know for sure, kneeling probably derives from a core principle in mammalian nonverbal behavior: make the body smaller and look up to show respect, esteem, and deference . . . Kneeling can also be a posture of mourning and sadness. It makes the one who kneels more vulnerable. In some situations, kneeling can be seen as a request for protection.

But kneeling during the playing of “The Star Spangled Banner” at the beginning of a sports event became a trigger of outrage when then-San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick did so in a gesture of protest against real police killings of real, unarmed African-American men.

The kneel before the anthem has revived in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a Minneapolis police officer. It still is the kind of trigger that got Kaepernick into hot water, most recently when several San Francisco Giants including their manager did so before an exhibition game. “I see nothing more patriotic,” said Gabe Kapler to reporters, “than peaceful protests when things are frustrating and upsetting.”

During the initial outrage, a fire onto which a certain president poured gasoline by demanding publicly the firing of Kaepernick and anyone else of similar mind and gesture, it seemed too simple to see the gesture as equivalent to grinding the American flag under the heel.

Smith and Keltner noticed something to which nobody else paid much mind if at all: “[W]ith a single, graceful act, Kaepernick invested it with a double meaning. He didn’t turn his back as the anthem was played, which would have been a true sign of disrespect. Nor did he rely on the now-conventionalized black-power fist.”

The fist first raised in tandem by Olympic gold medalists Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Games, even as both men kept their heads bowed on the medal podium. And a thought is provoked: Would those screaming bloody murder over a knee taken during “The Star Spangled Banner” prefer the raised clenched fist as a protest? A flag burning on the field? A riot, with or without looting and plundering included?

Of course they wouldn’t. Neither would you. Neither would I. We should acknowledge  that the Giants didn’t turn their backs as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played, either. Neither did Joey Votto and several fellow kneeling Cincinnati Reds teammates before an exhibition against the Detroit Tigers. It’s not impossible to consider that a gesture of quiet protest before the anthem and the flag is not the exactly same thing as a protest against the anthem or the flag.

You’re not required to subscribe to every last clause of the social-justice-warrior’s indictments to concur that rogue police attacking if not killing black people is not what the land of the free and the home of the brave is supposed to acknowledge or support. But you’re not out of line, either, if you want to say that perhaps the time is long enough due to re-consider whether playing “The Star-Spangled Banner” before every last sporting event everywhere renders it meaningless.

“By choosing to make standing for the anthem a matter of coercion rather than a voluntary act of patriotism,” wrote John Hirschauer of The Daily Wire—a conservative news and opinion Website— at that time, “it (quite wrongly) suggests that (sports) executives and the kneeling movement’s many malcontents in the country are unable to provide a coherent reason why America is worth honoring in spite of its flaws. Worse, it furthers the very narrative that drives protests like Kaepernick: The established authorities are afraid of the message they bear, and it is the established authorities’ ill-reception of this message that perpetuates the ‘systemic racism’ that threatens the lives of black men in America.”

“Saying that simply kneeling for the national anthem is so offensive that it must be confined to the locker room or banned outright,” wrote Robby Soave of Reason around the same time, “reflects the same hypersensitivity that plagues the social justice left.”

I don’t write all this lightly. I’m an Air Force veteran and the paternal grandson of a New York police officer who would have been appalled at rogue cops doing murder. I’m only too well versed in the knowledge that there are and have been countries too abundant where citizen patriotism is coerced upon the merest occasion and to the point of promising death to those who resist the coercion.

And I continue to wonder as I wondered originally: What’s the big deal? Why on earth does the national anthem need to be played before every game, match, race in creation? Doesn’t that really render the anthem meaningless? If we can (should) agree patriotism properly defined must come from the heart and not from external pressure, what should be done in this instance? My answer is the same as two years ago at first, and last year in the revisiting.

Stop playing the anthem before every last event every time.

Save it for the games, races, matches that coincide with genuine national holidays such as (thinking from today forward) Labour Day, Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s Day, Presidents Day, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Birthday, Memorial Day, Flag Day, the Fourth of July.

Save it, too, for the truly significant games, races, matches: Opening Day games, the Super Bowl, Game One of the NBA Finals, the WNBA Finals, Game One of the Stanley Cup Finals (assuming they begin in the American team’s arena), the Indianapolis and Daytona 500 races, the Kentucky Derby, the Belmont Stakes (if the race will indeed crown a Triple Crown winner), Day One of the Masters Tournament, each sports league’s All-Star Game, the MLS Cup Championship Game (Major League Soccer), Games One and (if there is one, as last year) Seven of the World Series.

If nothing else, you’ll have far fewer times to trouble yourself over players kneeling during the anthem’s playing for this or that protest. You’d also remove a sufficient coercive weight from the patriotic impulse that now makes the anthem too much a matter of habit and not enough a parcel of the heart.

As major league baseball’s coronavirus-delayed Opening Day is about to begin as I write, be reminded gently that, before you fume, froth, or flame over any players in tonight’s games taking a knee as “The Star-Spangled Banner” plays, they could exercise far, far more destructive ways to protest a wrong or make a point against it. As too many among us do.

The Dodgers bet on Betts

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2020-07-23 MookieBetts

Mookie Betts has 396 million reasons to smile big, and the Dodgers aren’t exactly complaining, either.

On the threshold of the Show’s coronavirus-compelled truncated regular season, the Los Angeles Dodgers—whose 2020 payroll, however pro-rated, is higher than all other teams except a certain one out of the south Bronx—proved they still have the ability to surprise and shock. They’ve made just made Mookie Betts the second-richest player in baseball, behind only a guy down the freeway named Mike Trout.

Last year, after Bryce Harper signed his thirteen-year/$330 million deal with the Philadelphia Phillies, the Los Angeles Angels saw and raised, signing Trout to twelve years and $426 million. Betts gets the twelve years and $396 million. Like Harper and Trout, Betts will be in one place for the rest of his playing career, something both those players wanted when all was said and done.

What a difference 45 years makes.

At 1974’s end, Hall of Fame pitcher Catfish Hunter—made a free agent after Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley reneged on a contracted-for insurance payment, thus voiding Hunter’s contract—showed fellow players what a truly free market for their services could bring. The following season, the Dodgers’ best righthanded pitcher refused to sign any contract no matter how lucrative that didn’t include a no-trade clause.

After their then-general manager (Al Campanis) injected personal matters into their talks, the pitcher refused to talk to anyone lower than then-president Peter O’Malley. O’Malley wouldn’t even think about the no-trade clause, either. Andy Messersmith said, essentially, “That’s what you think.”

He pitched 1975 without signing a deal, despite the Dodgers swelling the dollars offered. Then-players union executive director Marvin Miller enlisted fellow pitcher Dave McNally, planning to retire but technically unsigned, just in case Messersmith might waver. Messersmith stayed the course and, that December, finished successfully what Curt Flood started unforgettably but unsuccessfully.

Today’s Dodgers are owned by a group to whom spending top to bottom is no allergy. And, to whom securing top-of-the-line talent is no vice no matter how much money they might save otherwise. Like Harper and Trout, Betts’s new gigadeal lacks opt-out clauses. It also lacks a no-trade clause, but Betts probably isn’t worried and the Dodgers didn’t exactly flinch: he’d have ten years’ major league time after the fifth year of his new deal finishes, giving him full no-trade protection automatically.

“And if he is traded,” writes Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic, “his deferrals will be converted into present-day dollars, creating even greater financial value in the deal.” His deferrals are $115 million of the total dollars. His up-front $65 million signing bonus, Rosenthal says, “offers greater tax benefits for him as a non-California resident than regular salary and also helps protect him from the possible lingering effects of the pandemic in ’21 and threat of a lockout in ’22. His $17.5 million salaries in both those seasons will be far below his [average annual value], so he will have less to lose.”

Betts became a Dodger, of course, in last winter’s trade sending him and pitcher David Price from the Boston Red Sox, who gained outfielder Alex Verdugo, infield prospect Jeter Downs, and minor-league catcher Connor Wong in return. Betts and Price were part of the team that beat the Dodgers in five games in the 2018 World Series, though Betts had a very modest Series at the plate while Price started and beat them twice in the set. Call it compelling them to join you if you couldn’t beat them.

Different though things are between 1975 and today, the Dodgers generally still prefer shorter-term deals, Rosenthal observes, but this time around the shorter term wasn’t the more attractive one.

The financial strain created by the pandemic for 2020 and possibly ’21, however, made a lucrative short-term extension with Betts — say, two years, $90 million — far less appealing than it might have been before the game shut down in March.

Extending the term to 12 years allowed the Dodgers to keep Betts’ average annual value to $30.4 million, a big number, to be sure, but more than $5 million below Mike Trout’s AAV and even a few hundred thousand below Clayton Kershaw’s. The Dodgers almost certainly would have needed to go to a higher AAV if they had extended Betts in March; the Angels awarded third baseman Anthony Rendon a $35 million average in a seven-year free-agent deal last offseason. Betts’ lower AAV will benefit L.A. under the game’s current competitive-balance tax system, which might be altered in the next collective-bargaining agreement.

So what do the Dodgers get? Betts at this writing is 27 and even the Dodgers don’t expect him to be today’s Betts in ten years, never mind the final two years of the deal. Let’s compare Betts, then, to Harper, Trout, and San Diego’s Manny Machado, baseball’s fourth $300 million plus man who signed for that lucre last year as well.

I’m going to use my real batting average (RBA) metric, removing sacrifice bunts from the equation because, after further thought about it, I don’t think players should be credited for gifting outs to the other guys. Even if I think their managers ought to be credited even less for ordering the gifts no matter the intentions.

The traditional batting average still makes the old school swoon even though they know that a guy who hit .303 lifetime isn’t necessarily better than the guy who hit .302 lifetime. (The former is Pete Rose’s lifetime batting average; the latter, Willie Mays’s. Let’s set a lineup of Roses against a lineup of Mayses and see which lineup puts more runs on the scoreboard.) It also divides hits by official at-bats and treats every hit equally. Do you really need me to ask you what’s missing from official at-bats or tell you not every hit is equal?

My RBA metric takes total bases (which does treat each hit individually and by its actual value), walks, intentional walks (you damn well should get credit when the other guys would rather you take your base than their heads off), sacrifice flies (they’re not premeditated outs and they put runs across the plate), and hit by pitches. (They want to drill you, let it be on their heads and to your credit.) Add them, then divide by total plate appearances.

Here, then, are the $300+ Million Dollar Quartet:

Player PA TB BB IBB SF HBP RBA
Manny Machado 4,735 2,081 361 37 32 21 .535
Mookie Betts 3,629 1,663 371 25 32 19 .581
Bryce Harper 4,639 1,985 684 81 38 29 .607
Mike Trout 5,273 2,522 803 100 48 81 .674

You knew Mike Trout was the best in the business at this writing, of course, but did you really think he was that far off the charts? You knew Bryce Harper was talented, controversial, and often got hammered because of his inconsistent traditional batting averages, but did you stop to think that he was that much better than his critics have him?

Mookie Betts doesn’t look quite as good as those two because, batting at the absolute top of the order, he doesn’t get as many chances to drive in runs and won’t get as many intentional walks—unless, in this Mad Hatter of a pandemic-shortened season, he just so happens to be the scheduled leadoff hitter in an extra inning for which his team (and every team) gets a free man on second to open the inning.

If you think the other guys are going to let Betts destroy them on the spot (58 of his career 139 home runs have been hit leading off a game or an inning) instead of putting him on to set up a double play right out of the chute, think again. Hard. Especially if it’s the bottom of the extra inning.

Betts also isn’t that sharp when it comes to walks. He’s averaged 76 a season, which isn’t terrible, and is better than Machado’s 54. But it’s not Harper’s 102 or Trout’s 108. A middle-of-the-order man’s team can afford 54 walks a season; a leadoff man’s team needs him to be a lot more selective at the plate and not be afraid to take more walks because his number one job is getting his ass on base by hook, crook, and anything else he can think of.

The Dodgers have time to work with Betts on such things and others. They’ve also looked to the post-pandemic future and decided Betts is that important to their successes to come. They’ve also put a little more pressure on several teams to think long-term about their more obvious top men. Even if those men may not command quite the length and dollars of Betts, Harper, Machado, and Trout.

The Phillies, who have Harper locked in long, must be thinking a little harder about J.T. Realmuto. The Arizona Diamondbacks may start thinking likewise about Ketel Marte, if not now then not too long from now, assuming Marte continues what last year’s breakout began. The Houston Astros may now be thinking harder about George Springer, who also hits the open market at this season’s finish. Baseball’s financial health is better than the owners like to admit, and the time to make those men wealthy and their teams a bit more secure on the field approaches fast.

When the Red Sox dealt Betts and Price to Los Angeles, Betts was vocal enough about pondering his chances on the open market after this season. That was before the coronavirus world tour turned life in general and major league baseball in particular into something between The Twilight Zone and the Mad Hatter’s tea party. At least Betts doesn’t have to scratch his head because this time there really was tea in the cup.